There is one moment which sums up this extraordinarily powerful and moving film. Brenda Blethyn’s Elisabeth, a country-living mum who has come to London to find her daughter after she went missing following the 7/7 attacks, walks across a railway bridge plastered with ‘Missing’ posters featuring dozens of faces. The enormity of what happens suddenly hits her, and all she can utter is a desperate ‘goodness’.
After 9/11, Hollywood gave us Reign Over Me, a story that descended into sentimentality way too quickly and failed to move. Before we get too proud of this response to our own comparable tragedy, note that the director is French and responsible for the superb Days Of Glory, which told of the Algerian response to World War II. Here he tackles not just the grief of a tragedy but the effect it can have on the survivors.
The story is pretty simple. Blethyn’s Elisabeth is living a tough life working a farm in Guernsey, having lost her husband in the Falklands. She is devoted to daughter Jane, who stops returning calls after 7/7. Stricken with worry, Elisabeth visits Jane’s apartment in grimy north London, where she slowly learns that her daughter had moved in with Ali, a French-African Muslim, and they were studying Arabic at the local mosque. Elisabeth is just getting her baffled head around that when Ali’s father turns up looking for him. Ousmane (Kouyate) is an African who left his family years ago to work in France, he speaks no English and doesn’t even know what his son would look like now.
Elisabeth is mystified and horrified in equal measure, and is also convinced that Ali has somehow brainwashed her ‘good girl’ daughter, but the evidence, in the form of pictures of the couple together, suggests otherwise. She calls the police to deal with Ousmane, and his vague answers don’t help his cause, but that fact is they both have missing children, and decide to work together to find them.
The film’s huge strength is in using its simple plot to tease open many issues. The two main characters are almost from different planets – Elisabeth is protestant, fusty, bewildered by London’s ethnic mix and at one point barks to her brother on the phone, ‘the whole place is full of Muslims’. Ousmane by contrast seems physically slight, slow of movement but philosophical, religiously devout and equally determined to find his missing offspring. Talk about the odd couple.
They are up against a city that seems utterly alien – London has never looked bleaker, even Regent’s Park is colourless and stale – and a system that seems incapable of helping them. An early scene shows a sympathetic police officer taking Elisabeth’s details but warning her that there are lots of parents in the same predicament – ‘we can’t help you’ seems to be the message.
The two performances are from two very different acting schools, but that actually suits the material well. Blethyn is stout, matronly, determined but with fear in her eyes every time she hands out a ‘Missing’ leaflet. The late Kouyate, walking steadily with his stick, is doe-eyed, sombre and stately, never smiling, never laughing, never crying. To its huge credit as the story heads towards the couple becoming romantically involved it pulls back, a wise decision – that would smack too much of political correctness.
Overall Verdict: Overall London River lets the subject matter speak for itself, and is all the more moving for it. There are a few false moments, especially when Elisabeth utters the tired line, “our lives aren’t that different”, and Ousmane’s final act smack too much of metaphor. Compared to Reign Over Me though it’s a understated treat, and a reminder of that terrible, dreadful day in London.
Reviewer: Mike Martin
